Sunday, March 31, 2019

Auto-cryptograms have arrived!

There have been.... complaints, I guess you could say, that there are too many drive-by letterboxes with little thought or effort put into them. Mostly thrown out in the wild so one can show they were there or get an "official" plant in a certain state, county or even country. And that's fine, but finders want something fun! Interesting!

And it really doesn't take a lot of effort to do so. Copy and paste a clue into about a million different websites and get an instant coded clue! Which everyone love to love! A pretty typical, forgettable box suddenly becomes an interesting puzzle that can gives hours of solving pleasure!

So I created an option to turn any clue into a cryptogram! This has the added effect of hiding the clues from search engines which, of course, is a good thing. There's nothing more annoying that someone who finds your clue from a Google search then tries to blackmail you for using a "trademark" without their permission or whatever.

But wait! There's more! Solving a cryptogram over and over again can get a little boring so I created several different fonts for cryptograms for a bit more variety. You can use normal letter replacements like usual... or! You can use letters from other alphabets. Want your clue to look Greek? Not a problem! Use the Greek alphabet! Want to make your spy-theme box look a little more spy-like? Use the Cyrillic alphabet and people will think it's a secret Russian message!

There are also options to make your clue look Chinese, but they don't really have an "alphabet" per se so it uses symbols in place of letters which represent words like honesty and integrity and... well, I don't remember them all anymore off the top of my head. I think golf ball was one of the words, though, because who doesn't like golf?

I also added an option for the Pigpen cipher if you want your coded message to actually look like a secret code!

I plan to add more options in the future--the sky's the limit here! Have any suggestions? I'd love to hear them.

To get things started, I went ahead and turned all the clues for drive-by boxes into cryptograms so at least there's a small challenge involved to find the boxes. Hope you enjoy them! =)